Though winning the lottery and being struck by lightning are often cited as some of the two most improbable events that a person can endure, for one both very lucky and unlucky Canadian man, they both occurred in his lifetime.
From his first encounter with lightning to the probability of this whole ordeal, here are 10 pics telling the story of the lottery winner who was also struck by lightning.
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Though odds and statistics may appear to rule the world around us, to Peter McCathie, who both won the lottery and was struck by lightning, these seemingly ironclad numbers are apparently just suggestions.
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McCathie, who originally hails from Canada, first got acquainted with defying odds at just 14 years old, when he was struck by lightning during a boating trip.
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“I was trying to lock the boat up, it was a very sunny day, there was one big, white cloud in the sky and the lightning bolt came through the trees and hit me,” McCathie told local Canadian news outlet, CTV, of his run-in with nature.
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But as McCathie quickly discovered, not all of his luck was for the worse. In 2015, McCathie, who teaches mathematics at the University of Moncton, and his co-worker won a million-dollar jackpot after playing Canada’s Atlantic Lottery for roughly a year.
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So what exactly does McCathie plan on doing with his winnings? Embark on a second honeymoon with his wife, to whom he’d been married for 30 years.
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“I honestly expected to get hit by lightning again first,” McCathie said of his statistically improbable win.
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McCathie isn’t the only one with a penchant for the improbable. His daughter, too, also survived a lighting strike of her own while working in the Manitoba wilderness.
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"They had pulled off the lake due to storms, so she was locking all the canoes, making sure they weren't going to get blown away, and she got hit by lightning,” McCathie explained of his kid, who we can only hope inherited his lotto luck as well.
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Though McCathie may be too busy enjoying his vacation to crunch the numbers of just how improbable this series of events has been, fellow University of Moncton professor Sophie Leger decided to calculate it all herself.
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"By assuming that these events happened independently … so probability of lotto … times another probability of lightning – since there are two people that got hit by lightning – we get approximately 1 in 2.6 trillion,” she explained of her calculations.
